Designing Power Management Integrated Circuits (PMICs) is tedious and time consuming. For example, different customers of PMICs request different current drive capabilities and regulated power supply voltage levels. For System-on-chips (SoCs), there are many logic units operating on different power supply levels (e.g., 3.3V to 0.7V). During SoC development, maximum current delivery requirements may change that may require a significant redesign of the PMIC. Generally, PMICs are designed in parallel to the design of platforms (and/or SoCs), and reacting to late changes in power supply requirements on the platforms (and/or SoCs) slows down the completion of PMIC designs and thus the overall time to market of the platform.
PMICs also provide power to other chips (other than SoCs) on a motherboard. With many different platforms in the market, there is a wide variety of power supply requirements which today are supported by customized PMIC solutions. These customized PMICs may not meet the specifications for other platforms and processors that the PMICs are not designed for.